Civic Data Theatre for Deliberation: Green Space and Gentrification in Boston’s Neighborhoods
This 18-month long project, funded by the Mellon Foundation, explores tensions between green space development and displacement/gentrification in Boston. It will include participatory drama workshops, from which material will be adapted into a play with interactive moments in which audience members will be invited to deliberate over potential courses of civic action.

Call for Partners

Early Data Theatre Studio Workshops
In 2021-2023, cohorts of team members, artists, and Northeastern University students explored publicly available data in classroom and studio settings using a variety of approaches including improvisation, Theatre of the Oppressed, storytelling dyads, and Viewpoints.

Workshop on Southwest Corridor Park redevelopment with Livable Streets Alliance at Hyde Square Task Force
In February 2023, team members collaborated with Livable Streets Alliance (LSA) to validate survey data LSA collected on community members needs for the redevelopment of Southwest Corridor Park. Young people from Hyde Park Task Force used activities adapted from Theatre of the Oppressed to examine LSA’s data.

Meet the Team

Dani Snyder-Young (Principal Investigator) is an applied theatre facilitator, dramaturg, and audience researcher. Her work focuses on the ways socially engaged performance projects impact their audiences and their participants. She is the author of Privileged Spectatorship: Theatrical Interventions in White Supremacy (2020, Northwestern University Press) and Theatre of Good Intentions: Challenges and Hopes for Theatre and Social (2013, Palgrave Macmillan) and co-editor of Impacting Theatre Audiences: Methods for Studying Change (2022, Routledge). Her community-partnered research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Association for University Women, and the Arts Work Fund for Organizational Development; her community-based devised theatre projects have been performed in New York at the Public Theatre and the HERE Arts Center.

Dr. Michael Arnold Mages is a design researcher and educator who has developed community–focused data-driven deliberative design solutions that connect residents to city, state and federal government for over 20 years. He is the author of Conversational Design: Improving participation and decision-making in public organizations (2024, BIS Publishers). His work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Heinz Endowments. He has worked on the Obama White House initiative My Brother’s Keeper, US Department of Veterans Affairs MyVA Communities, with The City of Boston, The City of Pittsburgh, PennDOT, among others. His work on design for deliberative conversations has supported residents planning futures for their communities, patients adhering to their therapies, public school teachers designing their retention, tenure, and promotion systems, and veterans finding gaps in VA services. He is co-director of the Health and Wellness Design Lab, and core faculty for Northeastern University’s Center for Design.

Rahul Bhargava is an educator, researcher, designer, and facilitator who builds collaborative projects to interrogate our datafied society with a focus on rethinking participation and power in data processes. He has created big data research tools to investigate media attention, built hands-on interactive museum exhibits that delight learners of all ages, and run over 100 workshops to build data culture in newsrooms, non-profits, and libraries. Rahul’s participatory work spans across data sculptures, data murals, and data theatre. With Catherine D’Ignazio, he built Databasic.io, a suite of tools and activities that introduce learners from various domains to working with data. Rahul has collaborated with a wide range of groups, from the Boston Globe to the St. Paul library system and the World Food Program. His academic work on data literacy, technology, and civic media has been published in journals such as the International Journal of Communication, the Journal of Community Informatics, and been presented at conferences such as IEEE Vis and ICWSM. His museum installations have appeared at the Fuller Craft Museum, Boston Museum of Science, Eyebeam in New York City, and the Tech Interactive in San Jose. Rahul is an Assistant Professor in Journalism and Art + Design at Northeastern University, where he directs the Data Culture Group.

Jonathan Carr is a play director with 20+ years of experience creating theatrical performances in educational and professional settings across the Northeast including Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. His directing ranges widely in tone and subject matter, but consistently builds off of the aesthetic foundation of Viewpoints, an improvisational artist training technique. His favorite productions include Proof and Rumors (People’s Choice Spotlight Award) for the Seacoast Repertory Theatre, Largo Desolato and Mayhem at American Repertory Theatre/ Moscow Art Theater School Institute, and The Visit (Villanova University). Selected Northeastern University productions: The Moors, The Antipodes, The Skin of Our Teeth, The Last Five Years, The Phantom Lady, Company, The Marriage of Bette and Boo, and Billy Witch. MFA in Directing from Columbia University under Anne Bogart, who articulated the Viewpoints for theatre, and Robert Woodruff.

Antonio Ocampo-Guzman, is an actor, director, and teacher originally from Bogotá, Colombia, with 30+ years of bilingual theater workshop facilitation and translation experience.

He is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Theatre at Northeastern University in Boston, and the current President of the Voice & Speech Trainers Association. Antonio trained as an actor with Teatro Libre and with Shakespeare & Company and received an MFA in Directing, as well as a Graduate Diploma in Voice, from York University, Toronto. He is a Designated Linklater Master Voice Teacher and is the author of La Liberación de la Voz Natural: El Método Linklater (UNAM, 2010).

Dr. Laura Perovich is a design researcher with 15 years of experience in data analysis, physical and performance-based data displays, and community-based research. Her community-based research includes a collaboration with environmental justice communities and advocates in Chelsea, MA, to analyze open source data to create a performative community installation of environmental permit violations by local oil storage facilities. Her research has been published in top human-computer interaction venues (e.g. CHI, VIS, CSCW, TEI) and has received best paper and honorable mention awards.

Dr. Moira Zellner has over 20 years of experience with complex systems participatory modeling to support collaborative policy design and planning. Her academic background lies at the intersection of Urban and Regional Planning, Environmental Science, and Complexity. Her interdisciplinary projects examine how specific policy, technological and behavioral factors influence the emergence and impacts of complex socio-ecological systems problems, where interaction effects make responsibilities, burdens, and future pathways unclear. She also examines how participatory complex systems modeling with stakeholders and decision-makers support collaborative policy exploration, social learning, and system-wide transformation. Moira has taught workshops on these approaches for scientists and decision-makers in the US and abroad. She is dedicated to serving the public through her engaged research and activism.

PhD Student Affiliates

Angelique Motunrayo Folasade Àyìnkẹ́ C-Dina is a first-generation Afro-Indigenous embodied theatrical storyteller based in New England. They are doctoral candidate at Northeastern University focusing on Black feminist epistemology and embodied theatrical practices through research-based theatre. Her other accolades include: National Young Playwright semi-finalist ’21, Ronald McNair scholar ’22, Lime Arts Twenty by Twenty Fringe Playwright ’23 and Company One Volt Lab Playwright ‘24. They also serve as a research and design assistant for two Northeastern and City Of Boston projects. She thanks God, her ancestors, and her Black and Brown Indigenous community for guiding her journey. Ashe, Amen.

María Fernanda Ramírez is an Interdisciplinary Design and Media PhD student at Northeastern University’s College of Arts, Media and Design (CAMD). She holds a bachelor’s degree in Interactivity and Multimedia from Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador, her home country, and a Master of Science (MSc.) in Digital and Interaction Design with a concentration in AI and Design from Politecnico di Milano. With extensive experience as a UX and Service Designer for NTTDATA Italy and Spain, she has led design projects for newsrooms, renewable energy, aerospace management, and satellite deployment. Her PhD research focuses on designing for participatory and transformative processes to achieve sustainable futures. Specifically, she investigates community-level decision-making in the transition from emergency to recovery following natural disasters.

Alayt Issak is a Ph.D. candidate in the inaugural College of Arts, Media, and Design (CAMD) Interdisciplinary Design and Media program at Northeastern University where her research spans the triangular intersection of AI, ethics, and creativity. Prior to CAMD, she completed her undergraduate education in Mathematics and Studio Art (minor) from The College of Wooster in 2021. The following year, she joined the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana (UIUC) as a Predoctoral Fellow in Visual arts, Creativity, and AI within the Information and Intelligence Group where she illustrated a deep-learning based children’s book and a publication on the philosophy of AI Art. She currently publishes within the realm of computational creativity and is a recipient of the AJC Fellowship as part of the Northeastern Ph.D. Network.

Undergraduate Research Assistants

Elaine Zou is a second-year at Northeastern University, majoring in Data Science with a minor in Economics. She is passionate about using data to uncover insights, solve real-world problems, and drive decision-making. As an amateur screenwriter, Elaine is dedicated to the art of storytelling, a passion that shapes her approach to data analysis. She believes in crafting meaningful narratives from bodies of data and is excited to apply this mindset to give voice to untold stories through the Data Theatre Collective.